ITunes to IPhone Google Contacts Sync Usability Problems

Technorati Tags: IPhone,Rants

I have to say, I love my IPhone. But I have to say I hate ITunes in general as half the time, it prohibits me in terms of usability, and causes more pain than it does good. There are many reasons why ITunes lacks usability and but I will not go into all that now. I’m focusing today on the Gmail contact sync in ITunes for IPhone.

The main issues I have with IPhone Sync & Google contacts are the following:

1) Whether you like it or not, ITunes syncs all contacts in all your Gmail contact groups, with no way whatsoever to control this

Not just your main contacts, but also the following groups in addition to:
- Suggested Contacts
- Medical Contacts
  - (If using the Google Medical app, this shows up in your Gmail contact groups)
- Most Contacted

(notice that the “Selected Groups” option is always grayed out above for Google Contacts)

Result: You have to go back and manually delete a lot of unwanted contacts in your IPhone. Nice! More work for me. Why in the world especially would I want my “Suggested Contacts” group automatically added Apple?

2) Whenever you sync your phone, ITunes gives you no real information on what contacts specifically it’s about to delete, add, etc.

Result: you are blindly synching your contacts here, unless you manually eye for eye go back and look at your Gmail account and compare the contacts in every contact group with your IPhone and try to figure out what it’s about to actually remove or add in ITunes. This is time consuming and completely useless. I once lost the majority of contacts on my Gmail account because of ITunes, because of this reason and I was not too happy.

Apple needs to do 2 things to make Gmail sync to IPhone usable:

1) Add an option to control what Gmail groups synced in ITunes

2) Somehow show a sync window in ITunes, where you can actually see what contacts from Gmail are about to be updated/deleted/added and the ability to uncheck or check those in ITunes before you go ahead with sync

Someone please let me know if Apple gets this right some day. Otherwise, I’ve turned off Gmail Sync, it’s worthless to me and just creates more work rather than me just updating my IPhone contacts by hand & play it safe. I end up saving time doing it by hand in the long run, than to deal with the ITunes sync problems stated above.

Print | posted on Saturday, October 18, 2008 3:14 PM

Comments on this post

# re: ITunes to IPhone Google Contacts Sync Usability Problems

amen. :) i haven't been able to sync _only_ my wife's contacts onto her iphone. at first she had only my contacts (~210), but now at least she hers (and mine). the iphone is awesome, but seriously... get with it apple!

Left by shinronin on Dec 03, 2008 8:54 AM

# re: ITunes to IPhone Google Contacts Sync Usability Problems

The usability issue that I am having is with iTunes not sync'ing the postal addresses of my Google Contacts, with my iPod Touch Contacts application.

Left by Eric Herberholz on Dec 24, 2008 3:05 PM

# re: ITunes to IPhone Google Contacts Sync Usability Problems

You can get around this by using the App Store application "Sync in a Blink", with which I am not affiliated except as a happy customer. There are some caveats to its contact group syncing, though. I've put a write up on my site here. Hope you find it helpful!

-m

Left by Michael Ridley on Jan 01, 2009 4:12 PM

# re: ITunes to IPhone Google Contacts Sync Usability Problems

@Michael Ridley Thanks and nice post by the way!

Here's what bugs me the most. Sync is not easy to code or manage. But it is easier with certain types of data. Syncing contacts is defintely the easiest meta date to sync and so if Apple is going to provide that out of the box, they should make sure it's effective and useful. To this point per my post, it's useless.

The fact that I must on top of that buy a $5 app to fix what Apple failed, really bugs me. However I probably will go ahead and purchase Sync in a Blink because I just can't stand having to enter contacts in manually especially whenever my Iphone decides to magically erase my contacts which has happened several times (primary reason is because you can't sync on more than 2 PCs and the 2nd PC must be setup right to sync otherwise it will delete your contacts just like it does your damn music files....I love ITunes).

I don't really want to sync to my Gmail anyway. I really just need a one-way sync (From GMail to IPhone) so I think that IPhone app will work just fine for now until Apple finishes the sync feature that they obviously did not care to see to the end in terms of functionality and usability. It's almost like that portion of Itunes and Iphone just got dropped just so they could get it out the door and said forget the Gmail sync, we'll fix that later type of deal.

Left by Dave Schinkel on Jan 02, 2009 8:52 AM

# re: ITunes to IPhone Google Contacts Sync Usability Problems

Has Apple gone gaga?

It deletes the contacts on my Ipod Touch
and replaces them with the Google contacts !

So if I update a phonenumber on my iTouch,
I loose it when I hit sync.

That is not what I call 'syncing'.
That is just deleting and copying !
One-directionally !

A proper sync looks at
which information is newer,
which information is more complete,
and when in doubt, deletes nothing
but merges, resulting in possibly
(and thankfully) two entries.
Just to be sure.

Rather double than loss.

Thank god I still have a backup of
my address book on Funambol.

Left by Tristan Laurillard on Feb 22, 2009 1:37 PM

# re: ITunes to IPhone Google Contacts Sync Usability Problems

@Devan

I love how you stat that: "You're doing it wrong", nice condescending response. However, this link which you bring to us is:

1) a new link in Google help that is recent

and/or

2) a link that Apple refused to share with us in the past. but that's besides the point, sync with Gmail is still troublesome no matter what with IPhone.

It should not be this difficult to simply sync contacts...sorry, but I'll keep my SyncInABlink which makes the process SIMPLE AS IT SHOULD BE.

With that said, thanks for that link. Always good to know about recent updates by Google.

Left by expresso on Feb 24, 2009 7:09 PM

# re: ITunes to IPhone Google Contacts Sync Usability Problems

I wish I had seen this first. I only wanted my iphone contacts saved and synced. All of my google contacts now I have to delete from my phone. Itunes is one step above crapware. My Palm3 (1998) had better syncing than this!

Left by Andy on Dec 21, 2009 7:40 PM